My Respose to Colman McCarthy runs on the PostWatch Features page linked here. A couple of technical notes: I've run it in blogger form as a comment directly below McCarthy's piece. This is not the most elegant solution visually, but it'll take awhile for me to master ftp, where I plan to put other pages of PostWatch. Also, because blogger is blogger, I had to back-date my post so it would run below the main feature. So ignore the date already. I don't yet have comments enabled on that page, but please do email comments or, more convenient, make your comments right here.

How Far Left is Left?

By Christopher Rake

Colman McCarthy and I agree on a couple of things. The Post Op-Ed page can be numbingly predictable, and the quality of the writing is undistinguished. But I can see that we're looking for different answers, partly from examining the writers he admires. Mary McGrory is relentlessly predictable and Molly Ivins just doesn't seem to like people very much. Tom Shales is one the Post’s best writers, though he needs more editing and stumbles into the occasional spiteful outburst, like his attack on Bias author Bernard Goldberg (Shales wrote the “canard” of liberal media bias is the “first refuge of a no-talent hack.”). Jonathan Yardley makes a good proud banner for Book World, but the section can’t hold a candle to its counterpart at the New York Times. Courtland Milloy is a must-read, but mainly as an education about how people who blame life on white people think. continued...